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Meditation
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The Brain—Engineered for Divinity
by Peter van Houten, M.D.
Dr.
Van Houten serves as Medical Director of the Sierra Family
Medical Clinic and is a longtime resident of Ananda Village.
This article was originally published in Ananda's Clarity
Online Magazine.
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From the March
2003 Daily Meditator
In the early
1980's, I attended a revolutionary conference for scientists who
specialize in the brain and nervous system called, "The Ever-changing
Brain." New information was being discovered about the nature
of our brain and central nervous system that corroborated strongly
with what the ancient spiritual traditions of yoga said about the
brain's ability to change. According to the old scientific model
in the West the brain didn't change much during a person's lifetime.
The brain developed through childhood and adolescence and somewhere
around age twenty, it was thought, our brain cells began to die
off without being replaced. After that, it was a race to see how
many brain cells you would lose before you died! It was pretty grim.
At this conference,
we were presented with hard scientific data to show that the brain
isn't a static, "fixed-in-concrete" organ. In some of
the very early experiments, researchers found that not only does
the brain change in response to how it's being used but responds
vigorously by changing both its structure and its function. We've
known for centuries that if you were not in the habit of exercising
and you began lifting weights or performing some other form of vigorous
physical activity, your muscles will begin to increase in size and
will become stronger. Likewise, it was found, with the brain that
it changes its structure and function depending on how it's used.
For example,
suppose you decided one day that you wanted to become a world-class
musician, but you had never previously studied music. How is your
brain going to help you respond to your new musical interest? It
does so in several ways. In that part of the brain concerned with
music, brain cells begin to increase in number. Secondly, the interconnections
between the cells in that part of the brain also increase dramatically.
Thirdly, brain cells located near the musically related area are
"recruited" to help with musical abilities. Imagine a
computer automatically increasing its (RAM) random access memory.
A computer can't do this unless you buy a new RAM memory chip. But
the brain, because of its ability to change, makes the necessary
changes automatically!
 Two
important areas of the brain of particular interest to yogis are
the frontal lobes in the area of the forehead right above the eyebrows,
and the limbic system deep inside the brain. How those two areas
function influence greatly who you are: your behavior, your thinking,
and what you're going to do with your life. We can see on brain
scans that when brain function in these areas is abnormal, a person's
behavior tends also to be abnormal.
The limbic system
is a primitive portion of the brain, present in both humans and
lower animals, associated with survival instincts and basic primitive
emotions such as rage, fear or aggression. An animal knowing how
to nurture its young or defend its territory, are limbic system
functions. The human brain also has a number of these built-in instinctual
functions. Brain scans show that when people get very frightened,
upset, or angry, the cells in the limbic system start firing wildly.
Fear of heights, for example, is related to over activity of the
limbic system where a person becomes extremely anxious and out of
control on a ladder or a high ledge.
The frontal
lobes, located in the forehead, are the most anterior portion of
the brain. The most important portion of this area is called the
pre-frontal lobes. They are the most evolved part of the human brain
but found in a very limited way in just a few of the animals such
as dolphins. Human happiness and ability to enjoy life is very much
dependent on the function of our pre-frontal lobes. This area also
seems to be associated with many of our best qualities such as idealism,
joy, our ability to concentrate, creativity, and our ability to
think abstractly. For example, the saying, "a stitch in time
saves nine." People with normal pre-frontal lobes understand
what that means: you save time and energy by doing a thing preventively.
But a person who does not have normally functioning frontal lobes
can't abstract the underlying meaning and might answer, "I
don't know, . . . . . maybe I should fix my pants?" He wouldn't
be able to make the mental leap to abstract from the phrase something
more general.
As a primary
care physician, I deal with peoples' everyday problems and often
see patients who are clinically depressed. They lack energy or maybe
they're anxious, or perhaps they're not enjoying life. They lack
concentration, don't sleep well, or they have difficulty completing
a task. They tend to be obsessed by negative thoughts. A brain scan
would likely show their pre-frontal lobes to be very quiet while
the primitive part of their brain, the limbic system, overactive.
One of my depressed
patients described to me what it feels like to have his frontal
lobes asleep and limbic system overactive. He said, "I feel
as if I'm sitting in my car and the gear shift is in neutral, so
I'm not going anywhere; but I have my foot all the way down on the
gas, and the engine is going so fast it's about to explode."
This description seemed to capture for me what it feels like to
have one's limbic system revved up "with no place to go"
while the frontal lobes are asleep. It's not surprising that depressed
people often feel miserable and are disabled.
With this understanding
of the brain structure, it raises the basic question, "What
can we do to improve ourselves and become a better person?"
The brain is very responsive and will change if we point it in the
right direction. If we choose to be violent, our brain will respond
by changing in ways that make us more violent and coarse. On the
other hand, if we choose a life of compassion and kindness, our
brains will respond by helping us to manifest those qualities.
Anything that
makes us more restless or moody could decrease our pre-frontal lobe
function and over-stimulate our limbic system. We certainly see
this in children who watch a lot of TV. It seems to have a detrimental
effect on their nervous system consistent with poor pre-frontal
lobe function and increased limbic system activity, opposite the
direction we want to go, if our goal is to be joyful, calm, and
centered. In people who are the most mature and happy, we see evidence
of a person with a quiet limbic system and energized pre-frontal
lobes.
I think it's
great that we have this built-in safety net of a limbic system inside
us. If we're not ready to take control of our lives, we have this
automatic instinctual system to keep us out of trouble. But as soon
as we decide to step up to the plate and be "super-human"
or "super-conscious" we can do that, too. There are very
specific ways of doing this.
In the early
1970's, as a young researcher out of college, I was involved in
one of the first scientific studies done on meditation. We were
trying to answer the basic question: is meditation different from
sleep? At that time the prevailing idea was that when people sat
to meditate, they simply went to sleep! Part of our research was
to study physiological changes in the body and brain during meditation
to see whether this was true or not. This was my introduction to
the topic of meditation.
In carefully
controlled experiments, we had people meditate inside a plexiglass
box, about the size of a phone booth, hooked up to many different
instruments. In this way, we could monitor oxygen consumption, brain
wave patterns, heart function, and blood chemistry. Not surprisingly,
we found that meditation is very different from sleep! We discovered
that peoples' heart rate went down, their blood pressure dropped,
oxygen consumption fell by as much as 50%, and their blood chemicals
changed. In addition, their brain wave patterns also changed to
one significantly different from sleep. We found that many stress
hormones fell to lower than usual levels during meditation as people
developed an anti-stress or relaxation response and gained the ability
to enter a hypo-metabolic, or deeply relaxed state, at will.
We know a lot
more about the effects of meditation now than in the early 1970's.
We now know that there is a tremendous interaction between the limbic
system and pre-frontal lobes. The basic interaction is this: as
the pre-frontal lobes become stronger, the limbic system becomes
quieter. Meditation energizes the pre-frontal lobes and, in time,
the limbic system becomes harder to arouse. This results in behavioral
changes including better ego integrity, fewer minor psychological
problems, less depression and anxiety, and better social skills.
Such people tend to have better anger management, more self-control,
and tend to be more creative—clearly positive things!
Another thing
that has been demonstrated is that long-time meditators have better
control over bodily functions that are usually considered involuntary.
In a biofeedback experiment, test subjects were asked to raise the
temperature of their left index finger by ten degrees. Long-time
meditators learned to do that, on average, quite a bit faster than
non-meditators. The process of meditation tends to give people more
control not only over their brain functions and physiology, but
also over their "janitorial" and involuntary systems as
well. It doesn't mean that such a person "doesn't react."
It means simply that they have much more control over their reaction!
One of the complexities
of studying meditation is that there are so many different meditation
techniques, and all research tends to be lumped together. The good
news is that most meditation techniques have similar effects on
the body. There are subtle differences and over the next thirty
years we will probably learn what they are. The meditation techniques
we practice at Ananda and the techniques of most spiritual paths
focus on energizing the pre-frontal lobes of the brain, either by
concentrating the point between the eyebrows or by doing a technique
that promotes this even if one is not necessarily concentrating
there directly. Paramhansa Yogananda actually said that when you
practice the techniques of Kriya Yoga, you are energizing the frontal
part of the brain.
As Americans,
we like to have things proven to us. Now there is proof to corroborate
precisely what Yogananda and the yogic tradition have said about
the pre-frontal lobes and how that agrees with recent discoveries
in modern science and medicine. It's no longer like it was 25 or
30 years ago when we could only say, "Meditation will make
you a better person." Now we can say, "Meditation will
make you a better person and here are the studies to prove it."
From the
March 2003 Daily Meditator
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